Compliant Media Coddles Obama

There they sat, meek and silent and unrecognized, like extras in a Hollywood movie, only present to provide cover for a con game misleadingly called a presidential press conference.

There was none of the boisterous give-and-take such confrontations between a president and inquisitive, hard-nosed interrogators from the media other chief executives have suffered through. It was mostly softball questions from a handful of White House reporters obviously chosen in advance and instructed to ask President Barack Obama the questions he chose to answer with prepared 10-minute campaign speeches that on examination made no sense at all while sounding ponderously wise.

There were of course two exceptions. Chip Reed of CBS and Jake Tapper of ABC, both tough interrogators expected to ask reasonably tough questions for which the president had ready filibusters.

It was show business, obvious to all, yet there they sat, content to play their silent parts, co-conspirators in a scam that exposed for all to see the total surrender of a worshipful White House press contingent unable to conceal their unbound fealty to their godlike hero who in his divinity can do no wrong.

Think back to the usually contentious press conferences endured by such media targets as Richard Nixon ("what are you running for?" Dan Rather asked him, his voice filled with contempt), Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Not one of them ever fielded softball questions about how they were experiencing the delights inherent in the presidency. They were treated as felons facing tough cross examinations by prosecutors out to nail them to the wall.

Not so with the anointed one. He is untouchable, like a British monarch who may never be touched, except it appears by the likes of Michelle Obama who had no problem nudging Queen Elizabeth as if she was her next-door neighbor in the South Side of Chicago. Had she been a British subject she'd be in the slammer now for her exercise in lese majeste. The proscribed penalty for this offense is, by the way, death.

Barack Obama is above it all, a visionary who has come upon the scene to rescue America from the dangers of liberty and free enterprise and all that founding fathers nonsense that just happened to make America the freest, wealthiest, and most powerful nation on the face of the earth. Something had to be done about that and The One is the person to do it.

We were riding a little too high and it was the anointed one's job to bring us down a peg or two, and his media acolytes reveled in the thought that utopia has arrived and all those evil rich whose endowments made possible the high fallutin universities where they learned to be superior to the rest of us would be crushed under the weight of sacred Marxist doctrine unleashed, and long overdue.

They should be ashamed of themselves, but that takes a modicum of humility — a state of being unfamiliar to their idol or his media toadies.

Press conference? Not on your life. It was the theater of the absurd attended by sycophants enchanted by the impresario of absurdity made simple.

Phil Brennan writes for Newsmax.Com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web http://pvbr.Com and was Washington columnist (Cato) for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He is a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association For Intelligence Officers. He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.